Hitler internet cartoon causes storm in Germany

A satirical cartoon about Hitler, where he sits on the toilet complaining about Churchill, is causing controversy in Germany.

Illustrator Walter Moers is famous for his comic books depicting the dictator as a frustrated little man who throws fits every time the Jews are mentioned. But with the release of the short film "Der Bonker", Germans seem to feel he has gone too far.

Despite thousands of Moers fans making the clip one of this week's top internet downloads, many prominent German Jews have complained at the comic portryal of the mass-murdering dictator.

Jewish author Ralph Giordano, one of those speaking out against Moers' film, said: "You cannot treat the father of the Holocaust in this way."

And TV channels RTL2, ProSieben, MTV and Viva are refusing to show any ads by the Jamba ringtone company, which offers the clip as a mobile phone download.

Jamba spokesman Niels Genzmer said "Der Bonker" is still one of the top five most popular downloads despite the boycott and he disagreed that the film is anything other than a satire.

"First we were told it promotes rightwing extremism, then we were told it could be conceived as doing so. We cannot comprehend this," he said.

In the cartoon, presented in the style of a music video, a caricatured version of Hitler is shown in the bathroom of his bunker in 1945, singing angrily to himself about the way the war is going.

At one point he sits on his toilet and sings in rhyming German slang: "The Second World War isn't any fun any more. The bombs are not falling on England, but Germany instead. No one's listening to me, everyone does what they want, and the cause of everything is that Churchill. That hurts."

Later he gets in to the bath with his sheepdog "Blondie" where little rubber ducks wearing Hitler moustaches sing: "Adolf, you old Nazi pig, don't you see it's time to surrender?"

When Moers was criticised for satirising such a serious topic he replied: "May we do this? We have to do this."

Lea Rosh, co-founder of the Berlin Holocaust Memorial, said she does not believe "that this is a topic that one can make jokes about".

But Jewish publicist Henryk M Broder says he thinks the cartoon is a refreshing way of looking at an old topic.

"That Hitler was a murderer - we know that, it doesn't have to be the topic of every thesis. But Moers shows wonderfully what kind of a wretched, useless gasbag the Germans fell for. And that's groovy."